Weaving words and telling tales.

100 Things #21: Blogging.

…if this seems obvious, just hang on a second and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t obvious to begin with. I didn’t begin blogging for a real reason. I was pressured into getting an account on LiveJournal a few weeks into my first semester of college, after having met my first new friends since grade school who liked to write and share things.

I remember being at one of the lounge computers, agonizing over what my username was going to be, and finally resorting to numerology to come up with something. In fact my first entry was sort of a rant about that activity.

It wasn’t for another month that I began to see why people blogged in the first place: having a place to vent a while is useful; and, as I was between computers at the time, I couldn’t keep a diary as I usually did. (Not to mention that the place where I was living at the time didn’t really have a place where I could safely hide a traditional diary without being caught.) So my blog became a refuge for my mind as well as a place to show off my writing.

Three months in or so, I’d begun to really get into it, even if I didn’t have the comments or the reader stats to back up my thrice-weekly (sometimes more) rambles about things going on in my life, my head, and the world at large. It’d become more than just a case of “do it because everyone else is” by then, and I couldn’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t keep doing it.

After some time, it became second nature. Blogging became a way to determine who actually gave a fuck about me and who didn’t. If someone didn’t understand what the point of blogging was and tried to make me feel like an idiot if I kept doing it, I had to get them out of my life and right away at that. But I’m still amazed that the one person who I thought would give a shit about it never did, ridiculed it as a waste of time, and consistently called me things like ‘eccentric’ for doing it. …honestly, I don’t know why I stayed on so long with him.

…actually, that’s a lie. I DO know why I did it, and it was stupid. But we’re not here to dredge up such things. Especially with me out of nerve pills.

As things have gone, this has become a way to keep myself sane. While I love greeting new readers and sharing things I know (or think), a lot of times, this is mostly me yelling at me, pointing out what I’ve done that could be done better and making sure to drill that point home.

Then there are the times where I really do have something shareworthy, and my closest (in location) friends either don’t get it or don’t care, and I know that there’s at least one or two other people out there who don’t mind listening to a strange woman with a fascination with food ramble about things.